Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/20

 You may feel disposed to say to all this: We grant the major premises, but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this- necessary process of so to speak sympathizing humanity together. Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography and autobiography, for example? Is n’t there the lyric, and above all, is n’t there the play?

Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond the opportunities it affords for saying startling and thought-provoking things, opportunities Mr. Shaw, for example, has worked to the utmost limit, I do not see that the drama does much to enlarge our sympathies and add to our stock of motive ideas. And regarded as a medium for startling and thought-provoking things, the stage seems to me an extremely clumsy and costly affair. One might just as well go about with a pencil writing up the thought-provoking phrase, whatever it is, on walls. The drama excites our sympathies, I admit, intensely, but it seems to me it is far too objective a medium to widen them appreciably; and it is that widening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I think civilization is aiming.

The case for biography, and more particularly autobiography, as against the novel, is I admit, at the first blush, stronger. You may say, why give us the creatures of a novelist’s imagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we may have the stories of real lives, really lived, the intimate record of actual men and women? To which one answers: Ah! if one could! But it is just because biography does deal with actual lives, actual facts, because it radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitive survivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparable falsehood is the worst of all kinds of falsehood the falsehood of omission. Think what an abounding, astonishing, perplexing person Gladstone must have been in life; and consider Lord Morley’s Life of Gladstone, cold, dignified, not a life at all indeed, so much as embalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefully removed. All biography has something of that post mortem coldness and respect; and as for autobiography a man may show his soul in a thousand half-unconscious ways, but to turn upon one’s self and explain one’s self is given to no one. It is the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinis and Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding themselves with a kind of objective admiration, who do best in autobiography. And, on the other hand, the novel has neither the intense self-consciousness of autobiography, nor the paralyzing responsibilities of the biographer. It is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are figments and phantoms they can be made entirely transparent. Because they are fictions and you know they are fictions, so that they cannot hold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have a power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every novel carries its own justification and its own condemnation, in its success or failure to convince you that the thing was so. Now history, biography, blue-book, and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the statement that the superficial fact was so.

You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel : it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and in